


i wonder if it hurts to live –  and if they have to try

by chickadee



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Angst, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-12
Updated: 2011-02-12
Packaged: 2017-10-15 14:28:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/161735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chickadee/pseuds/chickadee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nostalgia does no one any good, least of all two broken victims of the Capitol's games.</p><p>Written for LJ user wolfpacklove for a Valentine's Day gift over at hungergamesland.</p><p>Title from Emily Dickinson's I Measure every Grief I meet</p>
            </blockquote>





	i wonder if it hurts to live –  and if they have to try

She calls him Finn once.

It rattles him, but who is he to judge when _she_ still climbs, fleet of foot, in and out of his dreams?

“I didn’t know you and Finnick,” he says, later. When she’s struggling back into her pants.

“We weren’t,” she says. “We didn’t.”

“Oh ok,” he says.

\----------------------------

“Do you ever regret it?” Johanna asks him.

“Regret what?”

“You know, everything.”

 _Yes, every second of every day, yes._

Instead, Gale says “of course not” and Johanna nods.

These are the lies they tell themselves.

\----------------------------

“What’s it feel like to be a Victor?” He’s tracing shapes on her back, between her shoulder blades.

“You’d know as well as me, wouldn’t you?”

“Come on, Jo.” Because fighting a war is not the same as the Games. They all learned that the hard way.

“You lose yourself in there.” And that’s enough. He lost himself once too.

\----------------------------

“I want to take you home,” Gale whispers into her hair one night. “What’s left of it anyway.”

“Will _she_ be there?”

“Does it matter?”

And the air is crowded with all the things they cannot say.

\----------------------------

She is there. And Haymitch, half drunk. And Peeta with cookies.

And everyone moves stiffly at first, in slow motion, wondering what to say, what to do, who to hug and who _not_ to hug.

They tread very carefully.

And then Johanna is in front of Peeta and he’s embracing her with his whole body, his whole heart, and he whispers “You look so happy” against her temple and she remembers the sound of his screams in the night and her whole body shakes as she sobs into the shoulder of his nice blue shirt.

\----------------------------

Back in Two, they stop dancing around with half-lies on their tongues.

“I think they were my bombs,” he says.

And, “I should have been there,” she says.

And, “I loved her.” And “I know.”

Little by little, they quit the past tense and give up _what ifs_. They learn to stop looking over their shoulders at what came before, to stop carrying the past on their backs. They practice saying _tomorrow_ and in the morning they wake up and choose each other, over and over again.


End file.
